


Secret Santa

by Wonko



Category: Holby City
Genre: Christmas Fluff, F/F
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-16
Updated: 2017-12-16
Packaged: 2019-02-15 17:51:09
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,309
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13036320
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Wonko/pseuds/Wonko
Summary: It's Christmas Eve on AAU, and Bernie and Serena are preparing to spend their first Christmas together.





	Secret Santa

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Cassiopelia](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Cassiopelia/gifts).



> For Cassiopelia, who made my year with the best comment I've ever received on a fic. You requested a Christmas story so here it is - I hope you like it :-)

Years in the army have trained Bernie Wolfe to wake at any hour she chooses. This skill has proved invaluable over the last few weeks, because it means she can wake fifteen minutes before the alarm every morning. Then, warm and heavy with sleep, she slides close to Serena and pulls her into her arms, tucking her head under her chin and kissing her forehead. Their legs intertwine beneath the duvet and Serena releases the most beautiful sigh of contentment and safety. 

It’s still dark when she wakes - darker even than mornings in Kiev, now that it’s later in the year and she’s further north - but it feels like she’s got her own light inside, now that she has Serena, now she has been forgiven, now that Serena has chosen her, against all the odds.

“You’re doing it again,” Serena mumbles sleepily, turning a little in Bernie’s arms to lie on her back, gazing up at her through half-lidded eyes.

“What?” Bernie says, trailing her fingers through Serena’s hair.

“Thinking too loudly,” Serena replies before pulling her down for a kiss, morning breath be damned.

Bernie doesn’t want the kiss to end but her smile ends up too wide to sustain it. Serena’s grinning too when she pulls back. “I love you,” she says, tucking an errant strand of blonde hair behind Bernie’s ear and taking the opportunity to trail her fingers over her neck and caress the fading surgical scar that does nothing to marr the perfection of her skin.

“I love you too,” Bernie says. She’s better at saying it now, though it still doesn’t come easy. She hadn’t even been able to manage it when she came back from Kiev, had ended up with a slightly lame ‘I more than like you’ instead. It had taken her a full week before she could make the words come and it was as if Serena had just been waiting for her to unlock a floodgate, because now Serena says it every day, multiple times: in the morning when they wake up, at night when they go to bed, at Albie’s when she’s a little tipsy, on the phone when they spend rare time apart. 

It’s still hard for Bernie, unused as she is to speaking her truths aloud. She’s spent a lifetime burying her love, repressing it, and that can’t be fixed overnight. But Serena is chipping away at all of her fears and doubts, eroding them like a river carving its way down a mountain.

“We’d better get up,” Serena says at last, stretching a little which has the effect of arching her back and pressing her naked skin against Bernie’s body. Bernie actually growls, and Serena raises an amused eyebrow. “Oh I say, the Big Bad Wolfe?” Her eyes sparkle. “What big teeth you have.”

“All the better to eat you with, my dear,” Bernie says, then disappears under the duvet.

Well. There are worse things than being a little late.

It’s a busy day on AAU: Christmas Eve always is, what with work parties and drunken revellers and icy roads that the council has, true to form, not gritted properly because obviously the idea that there might be cold weather in December is completely ridiculous and could never happen.

Bernie spends the day elbow deep in trauma, mostly RTCs. She removes two spleens and one avulsed kidney before lunch with Raf assisting. She pages Serena in the afternoon when a ten year old girl ends up on her table sporting a leg fracture with vascular complications. The driver of the car she was in - her father - has got away with minor injuries but little Holly has not been so lucky.

“Holly, eh?” Serena says when she’s scrubbed in and been brought up to speed. “How festive.”

Bernie isn’t in the mood to joke. She feels sick at the thought that they might have to amputate this child’s leg, that she’ll be spending Christmas in hospital, that she might never be the same again.

“Serena,” she says, and immediately Serena understands. Her eyes are impossibly gentle under her leopard print scrub cap. Bernie thinks she might just like to sink into them forever.

“Don’t you worry, Ms Wolfe. You may be a trauma whizz but those little veins and arteries are my bread and butter and I’m  _ very  _ good at what I do.”

And she is. Bernie is almost superfluous as Serena gets to work, isolating the bleed, repairing the damaged artery, restoring the blood flow. Bernie almost sobs with relief when she feels the little girl’s foot warming up and knows that Serena’s done it.

As they’re scrubbing out, Serena takes a careful glance at her profile. “That one hit you hard,” she observes casually. “Want to talk about it?”

Bernie sighs. “Do I have to?”

Serena shrugs. “Not if you don’t want to, darling,” she says, but Bernie has been trying so hard to be more open, to let Serena peel away her layers, and she knows she needs to let this story out.

“Three Christmases ago, I was in Afghanistan,” she begins haltingly. “Marcus gave me a hard time about not getting leave, but it wasn’t my turn. And I wanted to give the priority to the boys with young kids at home. Cam was grown up and Charlotte practically was, so I suppose it seemed like…”

“Like they didn’t need you?” Serena offers and Bernie nods, biting her lip.

“That was one of the things Charlotte brought up in that letter she wrote for Marcus,” she says. “How I never made the effort to spend holidays at home.”

“Oh, love…” Serena sighs, leaning against Bernie’s side in lieu of the hug she’d like to give her if they weren’t still washing their hands.

Bernie shakes her head. “Anyway,” she says, “it was Christmas Eve. We were just sitting down to what the army called Christmas dinner when all hell broke loose. A bomb went off at a school and I ended up operating on a little girl with shrapnel damage in her leg.” She rinses her hands for the final time and begins to dry them, a little more vigorously than is really necessary. “If I’d had a vascular surgeon with me back then...well, things might have been different.”

Serena reaches for a towel to dry her hands. “You had to amputate?”

Bernie nods, her mouth a thin line. “She was ten.”

Serena tosses the towel aside and pulls Bernie into her arms. She doesn’t say anything, doesn’t need to. She just holds Bernie until the stiffness leaves her muscles, until she melts against her and sighs into her neck.

“I love you,” Bernie whispers.

“Gosh, twice in one day,” Serena murmurs back. “It must be Christmas.”

The rest of the shift is, thankfully, less eventful. They even manage to clock off something approximating on time. Their hands brush against each other as they stroll across the car park, heading for Albie’s where their little AAU family has gathered to exchange their Secret Santa gifts. “Who did you get?” Serena asks for the fiftieth time.

“It’s called  _ Secret _ Santa,” Bernie replies for the fiftieth time, but smiles at Serena and captures her hand to hold for the rest of the walk.

The rest of the team are on at least their second or third drink of the night when they get there, if the red faces and laughter are anything to go by. “Work mums!” Morven slurs, opening her arms and pulling first Serena then Bernie into a hug. Cameron pulls her back, pressing a glass of iced water into her hands.

“Biological mum!” he says, hugging his grinning mother before turning to Serena. “Boss! And biological mum’s girlfriend!”

“Watch it,” Serena says but hugs him anyway. He’ll be coming back to her house with them later, spending the night so he and Bernie can wake up in the same house on Christmas morning for the first time in years. Bernie doesn’t know that yet though. Serena and Cam have kept it as a surprise, and Serena is itching for the evening to be over so she can see that look of surprise and happiness steal over her partner’s beautiful face.

“Come on you two, you’re the last,” Raf says, chivvying them along to a table that’s practically groaning with variously shaped and wrapped packages. They add their own contributions to the pile, then Serena accepts the glass of Shiraz someone presses into her hands. 

“Cheers,” she says. “Merry Christmas to all!”

It’s not long before Fletch takes it upon himself to be a Christmas elf and people start receiving their Secret Santa gifts. It’s AAU tradition to try to guess who’s bought what so the whole process takes ages, with people unwrapping their gifts (maximum value £15) while getting steadily drunker as the wine and beer flows. 

When it’s Serena’s turn, she unwraps a Funko Pop figure of Red from  _ Orange is the New Black  _ and laughs uproariously as she thanks Cam, who doffs an imaginary hat. Then it’s Bernie’s turn. She smiles indulgently as Fletch delivers her gift. It’s beautifully wrapped and a little heavy. Whatever it is, it’s solid and well made. She tears the wrapping off, earning a little tut from her partner who’s more of a gently peel off the sellotape and use the paper again sort of person. 

It turns out to be a photo frame, a beautiful one; silver with mother of pearl inlay. It looks like it cost way more than the £15 limit, but it’s the picture inside it that makes her breath catch. It’s a group shot of her and Cam and Charlotte taken during the last Christmas they all spent together. She’s got an arm round both of her kids and they’re all smiling, their eyes twinkling with happiness as they look up at the camera. She brushes her thumb over Charlotte’s face, trapped under glass, and feels tears beginning to prickle at the back of her eyes.

“Don’t cry, darling,” Serena whispers in her ear. “Look up.”

Bernie blinks slowly as she does as she’s told and there, in front of her eyes, is Charlotte, biting her bottom lip and shifting her weight nervously from foot to foot.

“Lottie,” she breathes, standing up and taking a step forward before she quite realises what she’s doing.

“Hi mum,” Charlotte says, smiling a little too brightly. It’s hard to say which of them is more anxious.

Bernie reaches out a trembling hand, as if she doesn’t quite believe that Charlotte will be there, solid beneath her fingers when she touches her. “Why...how…”

Charlotte shrugs. “Serena,” she says. “We’ve met up a few times.”

Bernie’s doing an admirable impression of a goldfish. “You...you’ve met up? You and Serena?”

Charlotte nods brightly. “Yeah.” She smiles. “I really like her, mum.”

“You...you do?”

“Slightly offended by the tone of surprise.”

Two blonde heads spin round to find Serena and Cameron smiling indulgently at them. Serena’s got her coat on and is holding Bernie’s out to her.

“Ready to go?” she says. “You two can talk more at home.”

Bernie blinks. “At...at home?” 

“Oh, didn’t I say?” Serena’s grin is so bright it could light up Wembley stadium. “Charlotte and Cam are going to spend Christmas with us.”

So far they’ve been very careful about public displays of affection. The occasional hand hold is about as risque as they’ve gone, so when Bernie takes Serena in her arms and kisses her like they’re in a Hollywood romance that’s just reached the climax of its final act, the bar erupts in whistles and hooting.

“All right, all right,” Serena says when their embrace ends. “Haven’t you ever seen a gorgeous blonde lesbian and her hasn’t-quite-decided-but-probably-bisexual girlfriend snogging under the mistletoe before?”

“Uhm, no mistletoe,” Cam points out. 

Serena waves her hand dismissively. “Semantics,” she replies, then pulls on Bernie’s hand and leads her out into the street.

Bernie is blushing, delayed embarrassment rushing through her like a wave. “Serena, I’m so sorry,” she murmurs. “I know you wanted to avoid the rumour mill…”

Serena snorts out a laugh. “I rather think that ship sailed long ago, my love,” she says. “Jason explained that we do a thing the kids call ‘heart eyes’ when we look at each other. Apparently he first noticed it the day I resigned as Deputy CEO, but he wanted to gather more data before coming to a definitive conclusion.”

Bernie blinks, nonplussed. “Right,” she says, then glances over at Charlotte and Cameron who are huddled a few feet away keeping an eye out for cabs. “I can’t believe she’s here. How did you convince her to come?”

Serena’s face softens. “She didn’t take much convincing,” she says. “She’s been longing to see you, darling. She just didn’t know how to bridge the gap.” With a gentle touch, she nudges Bernie’s chin up until their eyes meet. “Merry Christmas, Bernie.”

Bernie’s eyes are a little wet. “Merry Christmas. I love you, Serena.”

“Three in one day,” Serena whispers as she leans forward. “Whatever did I do to deserve this bounty?”

“I think you know,” Bernie says. She tugs on Serena’s lapels and pulls her forward, capturing her lips in a kiss, both gentle and passionate at once. They don’t notice Cam and Charlotte’s smiles or averted eyes, or the clock ticking past midnight, or the soft dusting of snow that begins to fall. They don’t notice anything at all until a cab draws up and honks its horn. They break apart, cheeks flushing and eyes bright.

“Come on,” Serena says, tangling her fingers with Bernie’s. “Let’s go home.”

Bernie smiles. “Home,” she repeats, and lets herself be tugged towards the waiting cab and her children and this unexpected gift of a Christmas with all the people she loves best.

**Author's Note:**

> That Funko Pop figure really exists and I kind of want it, even though I've never seen _Orange is the New Black_.


End file.
